Wallace Stevens

The paramount relatiom between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation  for what has been lost.  Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith:  the reigning prince.  Consequently their interest in the imagination and its work is to be reagarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital self-assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains, if that remains.